Sather attempts to retain much of Eiffel's theoretical cleanliness and simplicity while achieving the efficiency of C++. The compiler generates efficient and portable C code which is easily integrated with existing code.

A variety of development tools including a debugger and browser based on gdb and a GNU Emacs development environment have also been written. There is also a class library with several hundred classes that implement a variety of basic data structures and numerical, geometric, connectionist, statistical, and graphical abstractions. The authors would like to encourage contributions to the library and hope to build a large collection of efficient, well-written, well-tested classes in a variety of areas of computer science.